As many critics have pointed out, House Republicans are in disarray over the debt ceiling. Speaker Boehner could not rally enough support last night for his version of the Grand Compromise to pass without Democratic votes....so he postponed the vote at 10:30 PM.

Republicans will take another stab at it today....but honestly....with 4 days left until Doomsday, I am not optimistic that a deal can be reached.

It was a Friday night in the fall of 1965. There was a high school dance that night but football players were prohibited from attending because we had a game the next day. The coach didn't want anyone distracted over, you know, girlfriends. He wanted everyone focused and rested. So he made us attend a football players only night in the locker room that Friday evening while the dance was going on.

The coach periodically rah-rahed us with brief testosterone-driven, hard hitting macho-speech. And then we listened to Red Foxx records. First time I had ever heard a Red Foxx record. Tame by today's standards.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) is the guy I told you about months ago who believes that child labor laws are unconstitutional. Apparently, if businesses cannot exploit minor children in the workplace, you know, for profits....then we have given up our freedoms. Guys like Mike Lee and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) were swept into office last November riding the nation-destroying wave better known as the Tea Party.

Here's Mike Lee on Monday telling Chris Matthews what he expects from a Democratically controlled Senate...

In December it was a threat to increase taxes on all Americans if the top 2% didn't have their tax cuts extended. Down to the wire both sides went in that earlier ransom situation....and President Obama and his very weak band of Congressional Democrats agreed to pay the ransom.

In return for paying that ransom, Obama and the Democrats won an unemployment compensation extension for thousands of out-of-work Americans. Extending unemployment during high unemployment periods didn't used to be an ideological issue requiring ransom notes....but then....the Republican Party didn't used to be the way it is now. Or did it?

I'm just so sick of the D.C. debt ceiling amateur theater production that I thought I'd share something a bit more personal today.

Last week was a sad week for The Reverend household. Two extended family members died untimely deaths from cancer. The 55 year old was a great guy with a sharp wit who worked hard all of his too-short life. Drove dump trucks and worked commercial construction, no pretenses....good man...I liked him a lot. He died way too soon. The pain was so bad during the closing weeks, he injected his own morphine. The cancer was relentless....as it always is. It wasted his body away...as it always does. He left a wife and two grown children. It was standing room only at the memorial service.

Don't look now but we are in the middle of another Iraq moment. Though it happened over 8 years ago now, I remember it as if it were yesterday. Corporate media, working hand in hand with the Bush White House members, waged a campaign of propaganda against the American people, convincing a wide majority that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9-11. The overarching message from a power-serving media during that period was anything but unclear: Iraq's Hussein was a direct and immediate threat to the United States and the only course of action to take was U.S. military invasion and occupation.

Not one bit of it was true. None of it. 4500 U.S. troops died and 30,000+ were wounded...all because of a complete fabrication, a falsehood. 100,000 Iraqis (at least) lost their lives as a direct result of the U.S. invasion of a non-threatening Iraq. All caused by the repetition of a lie by the unholy alliance of corporate media acting as stenographers for a deceptive administration.

"Things Go Better With Coke", "We Bring Good Things To Light", "15 Minutes Can Save You 15%",.....slogans must suffice when substance is lacking and branding is the only goal. President Obama issued a new slogan shortly after the midterms that he entitled, "Winning the Future." A stupid slogan...it was. But then, most slogans are....stupid.

According to TPM reports last night, President Obama is getting sick and tired of the Republican intransigence over raising the debt ceiling. Obama walked out of tense talks Wednesday evening particularly perturbed with Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA).

After barking and snarling about no debt increase deal without Medicare cuts, yesterday, the Dawg who can only bark, Senate GOP Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, rolled over and surrendered his soft and paunchy political underbelly up to Democratic President Barack Obama.

A few short months ago, the new Tea Party controlled House of Representatives voted on Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan, a plan called "Road to Recovery"....the same plan I immediately labeled as a "Road to Ruin." Ryan's plan cut taxes on America's wealthy, and paid for those tax cuts by turning Medicare into a voucherized, privatized program in 10 years...paying for those tax cuts for the rich with the "savings" from abolishing Medicare as we know it.

Ryan and the all-but-five Republicans (zero Democrats) who voted to pass the "Road to Ruin" budget in the House immediately faced the backlash from the 3 out of 4 Americans who simply hated Ryan's plan. New polls were quickly taken and the verdict came in....Americans, by almost an 80-20 margin, didn't want cuts to Medicare as part of some deficit-reduction deal.

For over 2 years I have been asking myself why it is that Barack Obama hasn't used his excellent oratory skills to inform and educate Americans about the massive failure of conservative economics and how that failure brought the nation to the threshold of a new Great Depression. 30 years of supply side economics imposed by radicalized Republicans and many corporate Democrats, decades of deregulating paper and money shuffling non-producer industries, and a sustained period when corporate lawyers have been writing our national laws after bribing elected officials with truckloads of campaign cash.....have all resulted in the current dysfunction of our economy and our federal government.

Obama swept the political nation by storm in 2008. He did so by flexing his communication skills muscles. Whatever you think of the guy, most everyone agrees that the President is one of the finest public speech makers America has ever had. The question The Reverend wrestled with in the first 18 months of Obama's presidency was why, given the timing and nature of our great recession, didn't Obama take the opportunity of our national economic collapse to educate Americans over how such a collapse could have happened and who was most responsible for it.

One major difference in the two political parties has typically been found when comparing the two parties' policy positions on the issue of the separation of church and state. Obviously, the 1st amendment says that our government should write no law which establishes religion. However, many of today's conservatives simply reject that portion of the 1st amendment...simply ignore it altogether....much as those same conservatives reject the words "in order to maintain a well-regulated militia" in the second amendment.

When Barack Obama became president, American conservatives and unattached-to-reality libertarians immediately began trumping the terrible, awful, horrible nature of our nation's "runaway" debt. Oddly, during the George W. Bush years, when our national debt doubled, it was almost impossible to find even one conservative or libertarian whose hair was on fire over the impending doom about to befall our country because of debt. Apparently, debt is partisan that way.

One of the more popular talking points of conservatives during the Obama presidency has been that our national debt, now over $14 trillion, is fast approaching 100% of national GDP...gross domestic product. In other words, the U.S. is carrying debt which comes close to equaling the total amount of our national yearly business activity. To conservatives,...those who self-muted during the doubling of our debt from 2001-2009....the closer our nation comes to a 100% debt-to-GDP ration.....the closer we come to doomsday.

I dislike the smarminess and faux-humility of New York Times columnist David Brooks. His weekly appearances on the PBS Newshour are always flavored with deceptive conservative seasoning. His Dr. Phil wannabe psycho-babble approach in defense of indefensible conservative dogma is as predictable as it is unconvincing.

This week seems like kind of a slow week in our political wasteland....which allows for a head-fake column by Brooks to take center stage in setting off yet another dead end discussion in the blogosphere about the hapless and hopeless Republican Party.

Kansas has all but banned abortion in the state by passing restrictive building code rules specifically applicable to abortion clinics. Kansas GOP leaders realize the rules will be deemed unconstitutional.....they passed it anyway. Kansas is where the forced-pregnancy terrorist, Scott Roeder, assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller.